Assistant Secretary Gee, welcome. I look forward to your testimony on reauthorizing the Energy Policy and Conservation Act.

Last spring, I commended Secretary Richardson for his bold decision to add oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This creative and simple solution reversed a decade-long decline in our SPR inventory.

Using OCS royalty oil to fill the SPR was a watershed event. For too many years, Congress and the White House--under the control of Republicans and Democrats--drained oil from the SPR.

For too many years we treated our SPR reserves as a petty-cash account. Whenever we needed a quick deficit reduction fix, Congress and the Administration sold some of our emergency reserves. The Clinton Administration reversed a decade of bad SPR policy.

There is another area of SPR policy that is of great concern to me. Last November, President Clinton signed the Emergency Petroleum Supply Act into law. This measure is very important to Hawaii. Now that the Emergency Petroleum Supply Act is law, we have an important tool to safeguard Hawaii from economic harm in the event of a serious oil supply disruption.

Your department is in the midst of implementing this new law. I look forward to hearing from you about the progress of translating this legislation into agency policy.